The Velvet Revolution, preserved on film

The combination of political images with everyday ones becomes more than simply expedient in "Politics and Elliptical Visions." The revolution tells us more about Czechoslovakia and its artists than we would otherwise know, and creates a context better than any wall text for the show. It gives a whole new resonance, probably a deserved one, to images such as Pavel Banka's 1985 studio nude of a woman's soft, blandly sensual torso under an arc of wire that binds her head to her navel, awaiting some release.